


You Are Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant

by danahid



Series: The Things You See [3]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Advent Challenge 2009, K/S Advent Calendar, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 02:43:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danahid/pseuds/danahid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Kirk and Spock is a (true) story.  It is a story about two people who might have been (should have been) crippled by their respective histories, but who have found ways to survive out and beyond the ways they have of not-surviving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [ Livejournal](http://danahid.livejournal.com/12796.html) on December 23, 2009.

This is a true story.

It starts in the middle, the way some stories do. It starts during the transition between two shifts, when most of the alpha bridge crew has left and the gamma crew has only begun to arrive. It starts with a quiet moment, a circumstance rare and unusual for the _Enterprise_.

The Captain and First Officer are the last of the alpha crew on the bridge. The Captain has his head down. He has spent the last three hours reading through end-of-year reports and is determined to sign off on every report that needs to be sent in the next communication packet to headquarters. He has hardly noticed shift change. Commander Spock is similarly focused on his work. He is completing remote checks on an experiment he has started in the science labs that will run through the next two shifts. 

When he is satisfied with his experiment’s progress, Commander Spock rises from the science console. He moves gracefully towards the lift (he is always graceful), and pauses by the Captain’s chair.

The Captain looks up from his reports. “Time to go, Spock?”

The First Officer quirks his eyebrow in response.

The Captain laughs (he is often amused by Mr Spock’s eyebrow). “Okay. Give me a minute. I’m almost done here.”

The First Officer waits patiently, and true to his word, the Captain finishes his reports promptly. He sets his datapads aside and stands, stretching to remove the cricks in his back. Commander Spock continues to wait without complaint. 

The Captain bends to pick up something beside his chair, and then he and his First Officer move together, in step, towards the turbolift. 

This is a story about two people who started their acquaintance hating each other and ended up walking in step.

It is also a story about two people who might have been (should have been) crippled by their respective histories, but who have found ways to survive out and beyond the ways they have of not-surviving. 

Their story had an inauspicious (disastrous, traumatic, confusing) beginning. It is mostly (for various reasons) hidden and unseen. It is more than it seems.

Things (people, relationships, stories) often are.

Commander Spock knows this. (As a scientist, he constantly seeks to understand. He probes assumptions. He formulates theories. He asks questions.)

“Have you always been fluent in Vulcan, Captain?” he asks while they wait for the lift. He sounds professionally curious, as if the information will be important for a future mission. He sounds irritated, frustrated, annoyed that the Captain has never shared this information before. He sounds amused. (All of these may or may not be true.)

The Captain frowns slightly. “Um, yes?”

Commander Spock looks like he has more questions to ask but is not sure which he wants to ask first. (Even after all this time, he is curious about his Captain who is never who or what he expects.)

This is a true story, and like all (most) true stories, it recounts events that everyone expects are true. This is what everyone expects will happen next:

Aware that his First Officer is dissatisfied with his non-answer, Captain Kirk rubs his hand around the back of his neck uncomfortably. Mr Spock raises his eyebrow in consternation. There is an awkward silence. 

These things _do_ happen. But they are only part of the story.

This is what really happens:

“Don’t get hung up on it, Spock,” Jim says softly. He brushes his fingers against Spock’s arm, stopping him from entering the lift. “Wait up. I have something for you.”

“We agreed that we would not exchange gifts, Jim.”

“Yeah, I know. This is something I’ve had for a long time, though, so it doesn’t really count.” Jim shifts his weight from foot to foot, nervous, almost shy. He holds out a slim rectangular package, wrapped in silver paper. “It’s not anything special.” 

Spock accepts the gift as they enter the lift together. After the doors of the lift close, he turns to study Jim as if he is a puzzle he is trying to solve. His expression is soft (the look on his face is not one anyone, except perhaps Uhura, has ever seen). After a moment, he reaches up to touch the bruises under Jim’s eyes, the only visible sign of the stresses he hides under wide smiles and teasing jokes and captain-ly interest. Spock rubs his thumb over the bruises gently, as if he could make them disappear, like old hurts, one by one, so that no one can see.

Jim leans into his touch and closes his eyes. They stand still, too close together, until Jim remembers they are on a publicly accessible turbolift. He straightens, deliberately relaxes the set of his shoulders, reflexively tugs down the front of his gold shirt, and grins. (His demeanor may or may not be an accurate approximation of his usual cheerful and professional Captain Kirk persona.)

Jim nods decisively, as if they are discussing shift rotations. “Go ahead, Spock. Open it.” (If he accompanies his urging by looking into Spock’s eyes too long or too intensely, no one is sharing the lift with them to observe or comment.) 

This is a true story, although it is mostly unobserved. It happens in the spaces left behind by others, in the moments between conversations and crises, events and occurrences. It happens mostly when others are not looking, like many stories do.

It is a true story, and it is not finished yet.

Late during gamma shift, Spock enters the captain’s quarters without signaling first, as if he has done this many times before. “Captain. I have read the book you gave me.”

Jim looks up from the mission briefs he is reviewing and laughs. “Already?”

Spock arches his eyebrow. “It is not a long book.” He pauses. “It explores a set of ancient Terran beliefs, and explicitly links religion and humanism—”

“Sure, it can be about that,” Jim agrees, setting his datapads aside. 

“I do not understand.”

Jim stands. He leans his hip against his desk, folding his arms over his chest. “Did you like the book, Spock?”

“I did. I do not understand why you chose to give me this book.”

“It’s a Human tradition to give gifts during the holidays.”

“My mother was Human, Captain,” Spock says stiffly. “And that is not an answer.”

“Was there a question?” Jim smiles, his eyes mischievous.

“Jim…”

“Spock—” Jim pushes away from the desk and takes two steps across the room to stand in front of Spock, so close that they are almost touching— “don’t overthink it.” He leans forward, rising slightly on his toes. When he speaks, his lips brush the tip of Spock’s ear, and Spock shivers involuntarily. “It’s about a fucking bridge, Spock.” 

“Yes,” Spock murmurs, turning his head to capture Jim’s lips in a (Human) kiss. (In another life, he would have considered his act forward, indecent, unworthy. In this life, it just feels right.) “Yes, I believe it is.” He leans his forehead against Jim’s, soothed by the hum of that unexpected intelligence, by the scent and warmth of _Jim_. “A fascinating gift.”

This story is also about gift-giving. (It is not only about gift-giving.) 

It is a true story, and it is not finished yet.

Much later, Spock re-reads the final paragraph of the book Jim gave him, then places it carefully on Jim’s bedside table. He considers the words and the meaning they cast backwards on the story of a monk who seeks to understand the threads that connect disparate lives with a common fate. He thinks of the Vulcan words his mother wove into her tapestry — _Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it_ — and the man beside him who understands a language he never expected him to (who understands many things he never expected him to). He thinks of his mother and Jim as he turns the words of the book’s final paragraph over in his mind, examining them from every angle:

_But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning._

“It is indeed about a bridge,” he tells Jim.

“I know,” Jim says, smiling sleepily. He brushes two fingers against Spock’s in a drowsy kiss. “I told you.” 

“I love you as well,” Spock says. They are words that he usually finds difficult to say, words that he usually swallows back, bound by the Vulcan traditions in which he was raised, their command positions on the _Enterprise_ , his own personal emotional reticence. This time, this evening, he does not hesitate. 

But Jim is already asleep. 

Spock almost smiles. He brushes two fingers against Jim’s, returning his earlier kiss, then nudges him with his elbow to make him turn on his side. Spock does not understand why Jim always falls asleep on his back. He snores when he sleeps on his back. Spock finds it most distressing. (He also finds it endearing.)

It is late in gamma shift, and the room is quiet except for the steady thrum of the ship’s engines and (now) Jim’s deep, even breaths. As Spock settles himself to sleep, his eyes catch on the synthetic pine tree standing in the corner of Jim’s quarters. (Spock is amused every year by Jim’s insistence on having a tree.) In the artificial darkness of ship’s night, the tree’s tiny lights glow like stars. Spock assumes this is their purpose, to serve as reminders of a starry night, of the hope of light in the darkness of winter. 

As his eyes begin to close, they catch on something else: an ornament on the tree, an antique mercury glass ball, glinting silver against the green, reflecting and refracting the tree lights. (It is one of the few possessions that Jim carries with him. Jim has never offered its history, and Spock has never asked. He does not need to ask about the ancient hurts and poorly healed scars that have shaped Jim Kirk.)

Spock is tired, and his half-waking mind does not adhere to the rigid patterns he would demand of himself during the day. To his half-waking mind, the ornament looks like the Earth’s moon caught in the branches of a tree.

He smoothes his hand across the shoulders of the man beside him (his beloved), and his half-waking mind considers the meaning of the moon, which revolves around the Earth, the only home he has left. He enumerates the facts he knows (if he were awake, Jim would tease him that this is the Vulcan version of counting sheep): The Earth’s moon is a satellite, a secondary planet, orbiting the Earth. Its gravitational pull governs the Earth’s oceanic tides. The moon is its brightest during its full-moon phase, when it shines all night. The moon’s light, borrowed from the Earth’s sun, is reflected to the Earth and serves to dispel the darkness of night. 

Spock’s last thought before he falls asleep is that the ornament (and the moon) reminds him of Jim. (Or himself. Or both of them. He is not sure which of them orbits the other. He suspects it does not matter. He admits that he is more tired than he realized.) 

This is how Spock falls asleep, tangled (uncharacteristically) in whatever the moon means.

This is a true story, and it is not finished yet. (There will be more tangles to unravel.)

This is a story that unfolds slowly, in secret, like most stories do. 

(All the best ones, anyway.)

**END**

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The book that Jim gives Spock is Thornton Wilder's 1929 novel, _The Bridge of San Luis Rey_. The title of the story comes from a poem by e.e.cummings, which also inspired the style and parenthetical structuring of the story itself:
> 
> _i carry your heart with me(i carry it in  
>  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere  
> i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done  
> by only me is your doing,my darling)_
> 
> _i fear  
>  no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want  
> no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)  
> and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant  
> and whatever a sun will always sing is you_
> 
> _here is the deepest secret nobody knows  
>  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
> and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows  
> higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)  
> and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart_
> 
> _i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>    
> With thanks to definitions.net for facts and inspiration about the moon ([ http://www.definitions.net/definition/moon](http://www.definitions.net/definition/moon)).


End file.
